Kentucky police have concluded that Bill Sparkman's death was a suicide:
State police, working with the FBI, said at a press conference moments ago that Sparkman had recently taken out two life insurance policies that would not pay out for suicide. It appears Sparkman hoped that the scheme would benefit his son, Josh Sparkman.
Sparkman, of course, was the Census worker who was found hung, bound with duct tape, and with the word, "fed," scrawled on his chest. At the time, I wrote:
More gruesome details about the death of Census worker, Bill Sparkman, have emerged that make it obvious that - regardless of motive for the killing - Sparkman's killer was, by stripping Sparkman, binding his hands and feet with duct tape, scrawling "fed" on his chest, and attaching his Census ID card to his head, was participating in an exceptionally violent and lunatic way with the anti-government rhetoric promulgated on cable television and talk radio.
Obviously I was wrong about Sparkman having killers. It seemed fantastic at the time that anyone would kill themselves they way Sparkman did - it still does, frankly - and that a murder with such blatant anti-government details was, in fact, a reaction in some way to recent anti-government rhetoric. Instead, it turned out that Sparkman was spoofing Beck and Bachman, and a lot of us were wrong about his death, and obviously rushed to implicate high-profile, cable television righty extremists in it. In this particular case, we were wrong.
But beyond the senseless death and Sparkman's convoluted acts and the effect it will have on his family, the worst thing that will probably come out of this isn't that leftys suddenly look like jerks, but that the Glenn Becks and Michelle Bachmans of the world will somehow feel "exonerated" or cleared. But their vile rhetoric has already led to recentkillings. The story here shouldn't be that leftys jumped to conclusions, but that extremist rhetoric has already created dangerous tensions. Frankly, the only difference between the extremist rhetoric that touched off Nidal Hasan, and that which touched off Poplawski is that the Pittsburgh shooter's fare is widely promulgated on cable television and underwritten by mainstream businesses. Politicized right-wing misinformation and paranoia has been legitimized, and the revelation that Sparkman's death was a suicide means warnings about rightwing extremism will be viewed as unfounded or exaggerated.
What would real health care reform mean to Montana?
Let's put some numbers to the question. This week the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, via its HealthReform.gov site, provided a new breakdown of benefits of the Senate Bill for the Big Sky State.
Proposed reforms would provide:
* Premium tax credits to 93,200 residents to help them purchase coverage.
* Free preventive services to 160,000 seniors.
* Tax credits to 24,200 small businesses to help make premiums more affordable.
* Affordable coverage to 159,000 residents who don't have insurance and 79,000 residents who have non-group insurance.
Reform also would
* Help families save up to $1,200 on premiums.
* Make coverage accessible to people now shut out due to pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, which affects 6 percent of Montanans, and high blood pressure, which affects 25 percent of Montana adults.
* Forbid insurance companies from placing lifetime limits on the coverage they provide and from arbitrarily dropping coverage.
* Cut in half the cost of brand-name drugs included in the Medicare Part D "doughnut hole."
* Stabilize coverage and provide more affordable premiums for 15,900 early retirees.
The reform debate can get pretty abstract. People can argue forever about the best approach. But let's not lose sight of the fact that there's great potential for real change here--change that can make a huge difference to our friends and neighbors right here in Montana.
John Firehammer
Montana Communications Director
Change That Works
The following commentary concerning Senator Jon Tester's "Forest Jobs and Recreation Act" is from Dr. Thomas Power. Dr. Power is the former Chair of the Economics Department at the University of Montana, where he currently serves as a Research Professor. Dr. Power is widely considered one of the country's leading natural resource-based economists. This commentary is only the first in a series of commentarys Dr. Power will devote to critically exploring the assumptions behind Sen. Tester's bill. Please check back in a few weeks for the next in the series. - MK
"What I want to do here is simply outline the conventional wisdom from which Senator Tester appears to be operating. That will sound familiar, and, to many, convincing, but those assumptions are, in fact, highly debatable. In commentaries over the next two months, I will then seek to critically explore each of those assumptions ....As common and familiar as all of these underlying assumptions are, they are far from being factual assumptions. They are a mix of folk wisdom, economic nostalgia, wishful thinking, and barely disguised commercial and bureaucratic government special interests. Before jumping onboard with Tester's proposal, each has to be critically analyzed."
- Dr. Thomas Power
Hey there everyone! Happy Thanksgiving! I don't know about you, but I know that our family has a lot to be thankful for this year, as everyday. We just came back from spending a few hours at our local homeless shelter...The Poverello Center
Great opportunity. Anyway...for those of you that are in Missoula they could use a few other things for the big turkey day...
10 Large Cans of the French's type fried onions (for green bean casserole)
24 Large Cans of Cream of Mushroom Soup
Butter or Margarine
Marshmallows
Brown Sugar
Also...although they said some folks said they'd bring in pies...but they hardly had any today. So they could use some of those. What ever kind you want would be nice.
It reminded me that we used to do a pretty regular Holiday fundraising drive here for a charity helping people in need this time of year.
I thought it time to bring that back, so
Donate today to the Poverello Center and help Missoula families in need: Contribute here!
That contribution page isn't updating with custom images or text, so it's ugly. But that's OK. It doesn't need to be pretty. It needs to be a place where you can send $10, $25, or $50 to help some folks need. $10 covers a bunch of meals down there. $50 probably provides security for most of an evening so the guys sleeping at the downtown facility have not just a warm and dry place to stay, but a safe one, too.
I've set a goal of $500, but I'm hoping we can do better than that. I'll seed it with $25. But if we can hit that $500 goal, I'll kick in another $50 next month.
Donate today to the Poverello Center and help Missoula families in need: Contribute here!
Is the Montana Chamber of Commerce really working on behalf of Montana businesses, or is it just a mouthpiece for it's national masters? Reading Mike Dennison's story in the Lee Newspapers today, you have to wonder.
According to the article, the Montana Chamber and the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) have sent out messages to their members saying that reform proposals will raise taxes on small business and do nothing to address out-of-control medical costs.
But the opposite is true. Both the recently passed House bill and proposed legislation in the Senate would provide tax credits to businesses that provide coverage to their employees. And a health insurance exchange created by the proposals would make that coverage more affordable to small businesses. Right now, employee health insurance is flat out of reach to many businesses that would like to offer it.
In echoing the anti-reform sentiments of its national parent, the Montana Chamber appears to be placing the interest of large corporations elsewhere ahead of what's in the best interest of small businesses in Montana.
Pretty shameless, but at least people are noticing. Earlier this week the Washington Post exposed the Chamber's plan to solicit a slanted study on health care reform legislation. And today American Rights at Work launched a "Not My Chamber" Twitter protest against the group, decrying the its opposition to health care reform. Around the country, some state Chamber chapters are voicing their objections to the national organization's tactics.
The truth is, providing employees with health insurance is good for small business. It helps employers attract and retain good employees. Many Montana small businesses recognize this and are struggling to keep up with rising premiums unchecked by competition. Other small businesses would like to provide coverage, but can't afford to do so. Reform efforts will help, not hurt, these people.
John Firehammer
Montana Communications Director
Change That Works
My friend Jay Stevens wrote a while ago that his problem with the excise tax was that it penalized spending on healthcare and that we should be happy to encourage people to spend more on healthcare. If healthcare actually improved health, I'd be inclined to agree that it is worth subsidizing. But the correlations are relatively weak (and the odds that hospitalization can hurt or kill you are unfortunately high). Under these circumstances, reducing healthcare spending and allowing ourselves to spend more money on other things (perhaps sporting equipment or healthy local food, both of which can be expensive but would do more in general to improve health than more heart surgeons) would be a good thing.
I wrote a lengthy post on this subject before, but some of its essential points are worth repeating.
Insurance companies have for years sought to discourage policy holders from seeing their doctors by using low-end policies with high deductibles and higher out-of-pocket costs associated with preliminary doctor vists. The premise -- and Matt gets at this, too -- is that consumers, if allowed, would opt for expensive and unnecessary medical procedures, driving up the cost for their treatment. Insurance companies, by throwing road blocks between consumers and their doctors, goes the theory, cuts down on wasteful healthcare spending.
This is one of Ezra Klein's favorite lines of reasoning: because people don't understand how much their insurance actually costs -- employers a large portion of the costs -- they are less likely to consume rationally. And while that's true for, say, selecting prescription medicine, it's actually an illogical argument because people aren't rational consumers of healthcare to begin with.
Simply put, we don't like to visit the doctor. Giving people an economic incentive to avoid seeing their doctor only gives them permission to do so. Minor illnesses turn serious, and expensive. Malcolm Gladwell eviscerated this argument years ago in his piece, "The Moral Hazard Myth," which is well worth a read.
The problem, of course, isn't consumers. We're not choosing unnecessary procedures. We do what our doctor tells us. Our doctors, on the other hand, have a distinct economic incentive to give us procedures instead of care -- and Atul Gawande already covered this in his New Yorker piece, "The Cost Conundrum." Doctors get paid by what treatments they give to patients. Therefore, they give lots of treatments.
The answer is twofold: easy access for consumers to their doctors, and a payment system that pays doctors for seeing patients, not treating them. Good, affordable insurance and salaried doctors, say.
So, yeah, I'm not crazy about an excise tax on benefits. We've been down the road of discouraging patients from seeing their doctors, and it's only helped drive healthcare costs higher.
I continue to see people screaming bloody murder over the health care legislation moving through Congress. I don't have the numbers handy, but a poll (CNN, I think) recently found a narrow plurality opposing the House legislation, with a notable portion of those opposing it for being too conservative (worth noting, of course, most opposition was actually from the right or was self-described non-ideological).
The Senate bill, by most accounts, is a more conservative bill. It is financed primarily not by an explicitly progressive tax, but by an excise tax on health plans that will hit Goldman Sachs executives for sure, but will also hit a lot of working class union members who have negotiated health benefits for years.
The subsidies for purchasing coverage in the Senate bill are lower than I would like, meaning near-term affordability isn't what I would hope (of course, it also means less of a public transfer to private insurance companies, which I suppose is OK).
With all that in mind, people have been asking me a lot lately why I'm still supportive of the bill. For me, it really cuts to a few things:
The underlying structure of the bill -- subsidies, insurance exchanges, insurance market regulations, etc. -- are the right underlying reforms to make a public/private system work. They also may take us a bit closer to single-payer and certainly do not move us further away (e.g. single-payer supporters may not get what they want in this bill, but it does not foreclose victory down the road, which is important).
There are some very smart political incentives built in. For example, members of Congress get thrown into the exchanges with a lot of the rest of us, helping guarantee that the incentive down the line is for them to maintain high quality and affordability (relatively speaking on the affordability, a lot of members of Congress happen to be very rich and all are higher income than the majority of Americans).
The biggest point of all is that the Senate bill is extremely serious about costs over the long-term. What should worry just about everyone in the healthcare debate is how completely unsustainable the current system is. It isn't just that it is expensive or that administrative costs run too high. Those administrative costs don't even begin to explain the wild inflation that occurs in America's healthcare sector. You simply cannot have costs in 17% of your economy rise at rates 5-10% faster than the economy as a whole in perpetuity.
My friend Jay Stevens wrote a while ago that his problem with the excise tax was that it penalized spending on healthcare and that we should be happy to encourage people to spend more on healthcare. If healthcare actually improved health, I'd be inclined to agree that it is worth subsidizing. But the correlations are relatively weak (and the odds that hospitalization can hurt or kill you are unfortunately high). Under these circumstances, reducing healthcare spending and allowing ourselves to spend more money on other things (perhaps sporting equipment or healthy local food, both of which can be expensive but would do more in general to improve health than more heart surgeons) would be a good thing.
Does the Senate bill do this? We don't know. But it does everything it can to "bend the curve." Is that good for progressives? Depends on what you mean by progressive, but anyone concerned that health insurance is too expensive for low-income people and tthe middle class should hope that the low- and middle-income people of 20 years in the future have better choices. That requires bending the curve. And by all accounts, the Senate bill works harder to bend the curve than the House bill.
The Senate bill isn't just deficit neutral. Over the next twenty years, by CBO's (rough) estimates, it will reduce the deficit by three-quarters of a trillion dollars. That, as they say, is real money. It does that by long-term holding federal spending on healthcare steady even as massively expanding federal assistance to help low-income and middle-class Americans purchase insurance.
Even better news: CBO has at times been known for being woefully pessimistic. They overestimated the cost and underestimated the impact of tradeable permits for reducing SO2 pollution (which helped clean the air in my (and Dennis Rehberg's) hometown of Billings -- maybe "cap and trade" ain't such a bad idea, Mr. Rehberg). They overestimated the cost of Medicare's prescription drug benefit. And they routinely admit that they can't "score" the cost of key provisions of health care bills that may further reduce spending because these are experiments and folks like CBO approach experiments conservatively.
A couple months ago, a "meme" flew around Facebook as millions of social networkers changed their status to read "No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick." Both the Senate and the House legislation accomplish these goals. If we want to establish additional corollaries, such as "No insurance executive should make money" or "No brain surgeon should make more than $250,000 per year," we could have done that. But those goals aren't really as important, either policy-wise or politically.
Soon, we'll pass a bill that should effectively end medical bankruptcy in America and guarantee baseline health care access for all citizens (too low a bar, I agree, for a variety of reasons). Over the long-term, this bill will likely ensure that we need not ever turn back on that promise and that we may even expand on it, just as we did over time with the promises of the civil rights acts and Social Security.
There's a critical bill in danger of going extinct in the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd's financial regulation bill:
Dodd said outdated rules leave regulators unable to keep pace with the industry.
"Our financial regulatory system, created piece by piece over decades with little thought given to how it would function as a whole, is simply unable to prevent staggering greed and unthinkable recklessness from threatening our economic security," said Dodd....
Dodd's legislation would create a single bank agency aimed at preventing regulator "shopping" by firms seeking lenient oversight. He also proposed setting up a systemic-risk agency and a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to police firms for credit-card and mortgage lending abuses.
The bill would also remove the bank oversight powers of the Fed and FDIC and create a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, whose function would be to monitor and regulate financial institutions and the products they offer, including credit cards, mortgages, and other traded investments:
Under the proposed legislation, the agency would have the power to monitor the financial marketplace, including loans and credit cards, with consumers' interests top of mind. Existing agencies that have that power today have other industry monitoring responsibilities as well.
The agency would focus on making sure financial product disclosures are easy to understand so consumers know what they are getting themselves into as well as on financial literacy education and research. It also would have the power to write rules and enforce them on issues such as arbitration for credit card disputes.
The bill has hit a familiar snag: "centrist" Democrats, and nay-saying Republicans.
One of the Democrats on Dodd's Banking Committee is Jon Tester. In recent statements, Jon's reaffirmed his commitment to ensuring that "members of the insurance industry" have their "feet to the fire," and that national financial institutions are "held accountable" while local banks aren't subject to excessive regulation. One way he can be true to his rhetoric is to support Dodd's banking bill when it comes up to vote....
The U.S. Senate made history Wednesday night with the release of the Patient Protection and Affordability Act.
The act will give a lift to Montana's small businesses and working families by providing stable, quality health care. It will strengthen Medicare and control runaway costs while meeting the particular needs of the state's wide open spaces.
"We're encouraged that the Senate is moving quickly," said Jim Fleischmann, Montana director for Change That Works, a nonprofit grassroots organization with employees in a dozen states. "Real health care reform will bring accessible, affordable health care to Montana. And it can help small business owners who want to provide medical insurance for their employees."
He added that he's pleased that the Senate bill, like the Affordable Health Care for America Act passed by the U.S. House of Representatives 11 days ago, includes a public health insurance option.
"A public option will help guarantee choice and accountability and help break the stranglehold that Big Insurance has on our health care system," he said.
How it will help:
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will:
Increase health care choices, resulting in more competition and choices than are currently available.
Prohibit any rationing of health care.
Provide accessible and affordable coverage for the uninsured with pre-existing conditions.
Provide re-insurance for retiree health benefit plans. The Act will create immediate access to re-insurance for employer health plans providing coverage for early retirees. It will help protect coverage while reducing premiums for employers and retirees.
Close the coverage gap in the Medicare (Part D) drug benefit. The Act will reduce the size of the "donut hole" by raising the ceiling on the initial coverage period by $500 in 2010. It will guarantee 50 percent price discounts on brand-name drugs purchased by low and middle-income beneficiaries in the coverage gap.
Award small business tax credits. The Act will offer tax credits to small business to make employee coverage more affordable. Tax credits of up to 50 percent of premiums will be available.
Prohibit discrimination based on salary. The Act will prohibit group health plans from establishing eligibility rules for health care coverage that has the effect of discriminating in favor of higher wage employees.
Spur the state economy and generate state tax revenues. Investments in primary care clinics and community health centers included in the Act will create jobs for health care providers and staff, generating local economic activity.
Reduce drug prices. States spent $15 million providing prescription drugs to Medicaid beneficiaries in 2007. The Act will increase the Medicaid drug rebates, benefiting states and the federal government.
Source: Democratic Policy Committee
http://dpc.senate.gov/dpcdoc-s...
Why we need reform:
In Montana:
• 30 people lose their health insurance everyday.
• 16 percent of residents are uninsured.
• A total of 22,920 residents will have lost coverage from January 2008 to December 2010 unless there's health care reform.
• A typical Montana family will pay $21,822 for health coverage in 2019, unless there's health care reform.
In the 1980's, when AIDS transfixed and terrified the entire nation, decimated a generation of gay men and brought the concept of guilt and shame to a whole new (mostly sexual) level, something remarkable happened.
In the cities, ACT UP raised awareness of our anger and sadness, Gay Men's advocacy groups sprang from pain and suffering and LGBT Social Service Agencies were born out of frustration and feelings of helplessness in the face of open discrimination by established services. Our Lesbian sisters became our mothers and nurses. Our mothers and sisters became our advocates and protectors. And those very brave souls who self-identified as Positive became our Pioneers.
